Hiya,

Lately I've noticed while browsing user posted mods that some of the images look so clean and smooth, then I look at mine and they look jaggered and pixelized, How do people make the screenshots so pretty and clean?
I'de love to have smooth clean lines while playing oblivion and I'm sure others would too.

Any help is appreciated

Example of Smooth and clean lines in Tona's mod shots:




Cloudy~

The smoother lines are attributed to higher resolution and it is possible to take screenshots in a much higher resolution than your machine can render the game in full play. Many people crank their resolution and sliders up much higher than their video card can handle in order to take screenshots(I know i do) and it matters not that your only getting 1-3 frames per second since your only capturing one frame. If you have a quad core with 2 or more gigs of memory and a vid card with 512 or 768 mb of dr3 then you should be able to render the game in as high a resolution as your monitor will allow.

You can also enable AA, since that blurs the edges of things a bit. However this prevents screenshots from being taken by the game, so you would need something else to take those screenshots.

Vagrant0:
whats AA :o
I use FRAPS to take screenshots anyway so that shouldn't be a problem

Worm:
My resolution is already 1680 x 1050 for my larger monitor, I tried making it a bit bigger but nothing happened, I think I will try and crank it up as high as it will go..lol

You can turn Anti Aliasing up in oblivion or do it on your video card.

Doing it in oblivion will disable HDR.
Doing it on your video card wont obviously.

The best results I get are from running at 1280x960, sometimes with AA forced on the video card, sometimes not, depending on whether I'm running Better Cities or not.

For screenshots, if you just run it at super high resolution and then shrink the image 50%, the lines should all be smooth as silk if you use a paint program that allows decent resampling options.

Lets not be forgetting HRD and Bloom. Those, while next creating a higher resolution, will create a more smooth balance between contrasting brightnesses.

My monitor can only handle 1024x768 or something like that, but my lines aren't jagged that much, even though it is a crap resolution and I play without AA.

While on the subject of resolution, I wanted to know if anybody could perhaps list the pros and cons of a LCD monitor for me, as I know very little about it and living in South Africa they don't come cheap, which will strain my budget a lot and in that case I don't want to buy crap and have to live with myself for buying something that useless.

Here's a linky to compare LCDs to CRTs. After reading, you may choose:

http://compreviews.about.com/od/multimedia/a/CRTvsLCD.htm